How to double your real estate business

This article focuses on some ideas shared by Gabriel Garcia during the REI Classroom Show Lesson #499 with Mike Hambright by flipnerd.com. Let’s dive right in the interview. Enjoy!

Mike: Welcome back to the Flipnerd.com REI Classroom, where experts from across the real estate investing industry teach you quick lessons to take your business to the next level. And now, let’s meet today’s expert host.

Gabriel: Hey, everyone. This is Gabriel here with Florida Cash Home Buyers. And today, in this master class, we’re going to be talking about how to double your wholesale business.

Gabriel: I’ve been able to achieve this so far in my business for the last, I don’t know, say, about the last three years. I’ve been blessed where I’ve been able to double the business every single year. Now, I don’t think that’s sustainable for every year moving forward because the larger you get, the larger that’s going to become. But when you’re starting off, it’s definitely possible. Like I said, I’ve done it. So far, every year I’ve been in business, I’ve been able to do that for the first three years that I’ve been in this business. I’m going to go over some of the things that I’ve done to help me accomplish that.

Let’s get into it. The first thing I would say for that is going to be your desire. I mean, you’ve got to really want it. Not everybody’s going to want to double their business and you’ve got to be true to yourself. If that’s not something that you want to do, that’s okay. But if you do have the desire, you’ve got to make sure that you’re constantly feeling that desire. One of the things I always used to do is I always used to have a sticky note or a card. I would write my income goals on that card. I would always have those goals somewhere in sight where I could constantly see and I would always have those numbers in my mind. Every day, I’m looking at those numbers and my mind subconsciously is just thinking about growth all the time. This helps a lot.

There are a lot of visualization techniques you can do as well. I’d recommend whenever you have free time or on the weekend, I do a lot of meditation. For me, this comes naturally. I think about where I want to be in life. I think about where I want to go and I think about how does it make me feel. The secret here is connecting the thinking and the imagination with the feeling. You have to feel it. You have to feel that what you’re doing is possible. You have to feel like it’s realistic and you have to feel like you can make it happen.

I used to think about how it would feel to have X amount of dollars in my bank account or how it would feel to be able to take a vacation to go to Hawaii, or go to Greece or wherever I wanted to go, or just have the freedom to just do whatever I want whenever I wanted. Those seemed to really excite me. During meditation, I kind of experienced that inwardly, to see how that would feel to get you excited. And you can use vision boards. That’s the spiritual side of it.

Now you have the physical part and the mental part that you have to work on. As far as that goes, you need to have a plan, obviously, of what you’re going to do. I would say that the most important thing for you to set your mind on is marketing and sales. You have to focus on marketing, on marketing and on marketing, and then after you’re done focusing on marketing, you have to focus on sales, on sales and on sales. Those are the two primal things that are going to grow your business. Everything else is secondary.

What I would say is when you’re first starting off, that’s all you need to be focusing on. If you’re just a one-man shop, it’s going to be hard to just focus on that once you start getting deals though because things are going to distract you. Closings are going to happen and all this operational stuff in your business is going to take you away from that. When you’re first starting off and you have no teammates, that is normal. But you have to have the goals in mind and the plans in mind to know that you’ve got to hire the admin people as soon as possible.

If you’re doing marketing, whoever’s handling the coordination, get that off your plate. It’s not important. You just need to focus on the planning part. The implementation side of it, hire someone to do it for you. The closing coordination, hire someone to do it for you. The intake of calls, hire someone to do it for you. You need to start hiring all the stuff that’s not important, if you’re not either focusing on closing deals, on good deals, because you’re going to get a bunch of leads that come in from your marketing that are not worth your time. You don’t want your time to go there. You want your time to go on the important deals, on the leads that come in that you know, boom, hey, I can make $20,000 if I close, it if I call this guy right now.

On the marketing, you want to focus on your plan. You should have a marketing plan for your month. We do one for the quarter. We plan out for the quarter and then we meet before that quarter is over and plan the next quarter. I would either plan it monthly or quarterly so that way, you have a plan to go out. Hire the admin people.

The other thing I would say is to focus. As you start winning in this business and you start becoming successful, it’s so easy to get distracted by shiny objects. There’s so much stuff that you can do in this business. There are so many cool strategies. There are so many different ways you can make money. Honestly, all that stuff is going to stop you from succeeding.

It was very hard for me in the beginning. It’s probably hard for all entrepreneurs to just focus and just focus on one thing. That can be difficult. Luckily, I had a mentor and my mentor helped me stay focused. Whenever I would ask him some questions about something that was totally off our niche, he would say, “Gabe, why are you even talking about this? I don’t have time for this.” He would get me back on track. My focus was just wholesaling. All I was focusing on was wholesaling. We didn’t do anything else. We didn’t worry about lease options, about seller financing, about all these other strategies that are there, rentals, rehabbing, nothing. It was just wholesaling. There was nothing else. We just got really, really, really damn good at it. That’s one of the things I would say.

To jump off the point I just mentioned, having a mentor, either having a mentor or having somebody that you can go to for advice, that you can go to for guidance, that you can go to and leverage their experience to shorten your learning curve is huge. Because there’s no way that I would’ve ever doubled my business every year I’ve been in business without having that help. I’ve always had someone I can go to, whether it’s a mentor or a mastermind or a group of people that I can collectively be in a room together with, express my problems, express the opportunities that I have, know which ones are worth going after, know which ones are not worth going after, and know how to get over the problems.

When it comes to doubling your business, I’d say that those are the main takeaways that, for me, have helped. Obviously, there’s a lot more stuff that goes to it, but that’s the main stuff. If you can focus on marketing and sales, hire everyone else to do the rest of the stuff, your basic admin stuff. If you can focus on just one thing, two things tops, do not let your focus slip through. And if you can join a mastermind or get a mentor and surround yourself with a person or a group of people who’ve already gone down the path that you’re trying to shoot for, that is also incredibly helpful. That’s pretty much it. That’s my advice for that. I hope that I can be of service. Thank you.

Ideas shared by Gabriel Garcia during the REI Classroom Show #499 with Mike Hambright by flipnerd.com